Western Community College | Bachelor of Hospitality Management | Student Stories
When a group of Bachelor of Hospitality Management students at Western Community College reached their Entrepreneurship course, they didn’t set out to launch a startup. They set out to solve a problem they had personally lived. The result was 2EZ Savings, a fully conceived, research-backed concept for a smart barcode scanner that helps families and food service operators track groceries, monitor expiry dates, and cut down on the avoidable waste that quietly costs Canadian households over $1,100 a year. The device was never manufactured. The app was never launched. But what came out of this project, the thinking, the research, the financial modelling, the genuine empathy for the customer, tells a story worth sharing.
The People Behind the Idea
Sukhpreet Sandhu, Sukhvir Singh, Jaspreet Singh, and Navjot Singh came to Western Community College from somewhere else. As newcomers to Canada, they were each managing the layered challenges that come with building a life in a new country: learning systems, stretching budgets, working in the industry, and studying for a degree at the same time. That experience, more than anything else, is what shaped this project. They knew what it felt like to watch groceries go to waste when money was tight. The hotel kitchens and food service operations they had seen showed them how much gets thrown out when expiry dates slip through the cracks. They were watching a problem that most people in the industry had stopped noticing because it had become background noise. Seeing what others have normalized is one of the most valuable things a newcomer perspective can offer, and it is genuinely underappreciated in conversations about innovation in hospitality.
What They Imagined
The 2EZ Savings concept is straightforward. A barcode scanner attaches to any fridge regardless of brand or model. You scan your groceries as you load them in, which takes seconds, and the device automatically tracks expiry dates without any manual entry. It sends alerts to your phone before food is about to go bad. The existing alternatives on the market, primarily smart fridges with built-in inventory features, start around $3,000 and require replacing your appliance entirely. They are expensive, brand-specific, and designed for a consumer who already has significant disposable income. The students recognized that the families who stand to benefit most from reducing food waste are rarely in a position to buy a new refrigerator to do it.
Their solution was a one-time device purchase with an optional $50 per year premium subscription. Affordable, compatible with what people already own, and simple enough that it would actually get used. Beyond the product itself, the team built a complete business case. They developed a brand identity and market positioning, defined a primary customer persona, mapped out a multi-channel marketing strategy, and worked through financial projections covering device costs, variable costs, and subscription revenue. They designed a subscriber lifecycle model grounded in the loyalty and retention principles their hospitality program had introduced them to. They were thinking like entrepreneurs. They just happened to still be students.
What the Curriculum Made Possible
The depth of their work didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a full program building on itself across terms, with the Entrepreneurship course providing the direct framework for this project. The course asks students to examine the relationship between entrepreneurship and corporate strategy, compare models of corporate entrepreneurship, and analyse the structural constraints that shape whether innovative ideas succeed or stall. It also asks them to think beyond the private sector entirely, exploring how the entrepreneurial process works differently across business, non-profit, and government contexts. That last point is worth noting, because 2EZ Savings was never conceived as a pure profit play. The students genuinely cared about food security, sustainability, and accessibility, and that came through in every layer of the concept. They also engaged with the idea of intrapreneurship, the development of an entrepreneurial culture within an existing organization, which gave their thinking about hospitality industry adoption a more nuanced quality. They weren’t just imagining consumers buying a device. They were thinking about how a solution like this could be integrated into hotel operations, staff training, and food service management.
The other courses that fed into this project, Hospitality Marketing and Sales, Cost Controls and Profitability in Food and Beverage Management, and Business Research Methods, provided the technical scaffolding. But it was the Entrepreneurship course that gave the team permission to think big, question assumptions, and ask what it actually takes to build something that lasts. The 2EZ Savings team drew on all of it. That integration is exactly what the program is designed to produce.
An Entrepreneurial Spirit That Doesn’t Need a Launch Date
There is a kind of entrepreneurship that tends to get overlooked: the kind that exists fully in the thinking stage, that solves a problem completely on paper, that demonstrates real vision and rigour without ever reaching a pitch competition or a product launch. For many newcomer students who are working, supporting families, navigating immigration processes, and carrying a full course load, that is precisely where innovation lives, in the in-between spaces, in the clarity of seeing a problem and caring enough to work through it properly. 2EZ Savings is that kind of idea. It shows that these students understood the market gap, the customer, the technology barrier, the affordability issue, and the sustainability case. They built a marketing strategy, a financial model, and a brand from scratch, not because they had resources or runway, but because their program gave them the tools and their lives gave them the insight. That combination of observational sharpness and structured thinking is something the hospitality industry genuinely needs, and something WCC is committed to helping students develop.
What This Project Actually Proves
Not every classroom idea becomes a company, and that is fine. What projects like this leave behind is something more durable: a sharper thinker, a more confident problem-solver, a future manager or operator who knows firsthand that they can take an observation and build something coherent and compelling around it. For Sukhpreet, Sukhvir, Jaspreet, and Navjot, that is not a minor outcome. They arrived in a new country, found their footing, enrolled in a degree program, and produced work that could stand up in any professional setting.
Study Hospitality Management at WCC
The Bachelor of Hospitality Management at Western Community College is built for students who want to do more than manage operations. The program develops leaders who can think strategically, work sustainably, and bring genuine creativity to the challenges facing the industry. Students graduate with 555 hours of industry work experience across two placements, a curriculum that moves from operations and finance through to sustainability, leadership, and entrepreneurship, and a community of classmates who bring diverse, global perspectives into every classroom. Ninety-seven percent of BHM graduates are employed upon graduation, earning an average of $33 per hour. But the harder thing to measure is the confidence and capability these students carry out with them. The 2EZ Savings team is a good example of what that looks like in practice.
